Along with Sister Geraldine, and Lucette, who founded the chocolate factory, there is the tenant farmer from Skellar whom Eva often interviewed during August, on the outlying island of Skalpay, as he sheared the tough breed of sheep he kept there. There’s the young school-leaver from Astrid who begins by working in the crab factory, and eventually graduates to ferrywoman on the service between Lerston and Dounsay. There’s the mackerel fisherman, happiest on his trawler (they’ll be the ones catching fish next, he comments grumpily of women in general, after his niece becomes manager of Lerston Pelagic); the schoolteacher from remote and windy Tarn; the stay-at-home mother from Eastray; the woman who runs Dounsay Dairy; the hippy woman who set up the organic veg-box scheme at Tarbert; the woman from the post office; the Tarn boy who works on a North Sea oil rig and loves the big money he is getting just as much as he comes to hate being apart from his family; and Jonny Brant, originally of Clifton, Bristol, who moved up to Astrid as a boy with his parents when the council was giving away vacant plots of land for free in the 1960s.

Anyone who watches all two hundred or so hours of footage (the tapes are available for viewing at the Islands of Women Foundation Archive) will hear the pride in Eva’s voice, as she talks to her interviewees. It is also almost possible to hear her shouting – for example, at the farmer from Skellar, who explains that his daughter has gone from an internship at Archipelago Now to a job with the Scotsman in Edinburgh, and yet, when pressed, puts these opportunities down to the increased amount of meat in the modern island diet – We did it! We did!

JUDGE: How did Eva’s work change things for you on the islands?

JONNY: On Astrid? It didn’t.

JUDGE: You got a community shop?

JONNY: That wasn’t anything to do with Eva.

JUDGE: It was set up by—

JONNY: My wife and three other women set it up.

JUDGE: Did they get help? Seed funding, for example?

JONNY: Yes, from a fund called—Can’t remember the name.

JUDGE: Archipelago Women in Work?

JONNY: Possibly.

JUDGE: Is the shop going well?

JONNY: Very.

JUDGE: What difference has it made to your life, directly?

JONNY: ...Er. Don’t have to go to Aldi in Ayrness?

JUDGE: Who looks after the grand-kids while your wife is in the shop?

JONNY: I do. I do.

During all this time, Eva was scrupulous in keeping up appearances. That is, she remained, to the outside world, the same respectable-looking person as before; she had probably taught a quarter of the island’s population by the time she gave up teaching to become deputy principal. Despite the power she wielded, nobody guessed what she was doing, least of all her sons. She remained, until the end, discreet, secretive – a tale that unfolds inwards.